Why Don’t People Eat Healthier?

Re-watched the video and manually transcribed it just to make sure I'm not just watching it passively on my phone while doing other things around the house ... :

Taking personal responsibility for our health is one of the most important things we can do. Regular exercise, not smoking and eating a healthy diet can help prevent and even reverse some of our most common diseases. And most people know this ... so why don't they eat healthier?

Watch the video to find out.

Yes, media messages surrounding nutrition are often inconsistent and confusing, but many Americans know what constitutes a healthy diet. I mean, does anyone really think drinking brown carbonated sugar water is good for them?

Many Americans know what constitutes a healthful diet, but they do not appear to be translating their knowledge into action.

At issue is that they don't appear to be translating their knowledge into action.

There are a number of reasons people have such difficulty changing their dietary behaviours. While ignorance and confusion may play a part, the motivation to change is likely much more important. Certainly, we are living in a world that pushes us to eat whatever we want, regardless of the long-term consequences. But one of the major problems in getting people to change their behaviour is the need to get them to recognise the need to change. For example, if you ask people how much meat they eat, or how much greasy food, eggs, sweets, alcohol, butter, they claim to be eating less than the average person. So if people think they're at less risk than others, they may dismiss advice to eat more healthfully, thinking that they already eat healthier. Maybe they are? No, people rated their own eating behaviour as healthier on average even when their actual eating habits were terrible. For this reason, maybe health-promotion campaigns need to make aware of how badly they are eating. But when you do that, a strange thing happens.

When we challenged such beliefs by providing subjects with information about the actual average frequencies of health-threatening behaviours reported by their peers, subjects shifted their own self-views and reported engaging in these behaviours less frequently than control subjects who had not been given any information about their peers.

If you challenge people with the reality of what the average person actually eats, they change their answer to make themselves appear as though they're still healthier than average.

When people's favourable comparisons on risky behaviours are threatened, they not only reduce their estimates of how often they engage in those behaviours - "oh, I don't eat that much meat" - but they also attenuate the significance of those behaviours: "Meat's not that bad for you anyway."

Continue: https://youtu.be/q51bJ6QTKns?t=142

dwyl / health

Why Don’t People Eat Healthier? #154